A Designer’s Art

Yale University Press (1985)

7.75 x 10 hardcover edition with 240 pages and 153 b/w illustrations and 55 color plates of work samples by the author. 27 Collected essays and illustrations of the work of possibly the most influential graphic designer of them all. This book is a revised and updated version of Thoughts on Design, Rand's legendary first book from 1947.

Paul Rand was the first recipient of the Florence Prize for Visual Communication in 1987.

Contents:

Art for Art's Sake

The Beautiful and the Useful

The Designer's Problem

The Symbol in Visual Communication

Versatility of the Symbol

The Trademark

Seeing Stripes

Imagination and the Image

Integrating Form and Content

Ideas About Ideas

The Meaningof Repitition

The Role of Humor

The Rebus and the Visual Pun

Collage and Montage

Yesterday and Today

Typographic Form and Expression

About Legibility

The Good Old Neue Typografie

Design and the Play Instinct

Black Black Black

The Art of the Package: Tomorrow and Yesterday

The Third Dimension

The Complexity of Color

Word Pictures

The Lesson of Cezanne

Politics of Design

Integrity and Invention

“A monograph-cum-manifesto by America’s leading modernist designer and corporate communications pioneer… . This book describes design as a formal, aesthetic, and conceptual marriage of rationalism and wit.”
—Lingua Franca

… [He] describes his work with the same precision, economy, and passion he displays in his graphic designs, and he lets us understand the nature of his relationships with his clients, his audience, and his art.”
—Alan Fern, New York Times Book Review

“The outstanding design book of the year.”
—Thomas Hine, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“In a profession that is constantly pulled toward the banal, the trivial, and the predictable, the history of [Rand’s] accomplishment keeps us honest.”
—Milton Glaser

“In the future I will present this book to our Swiss printers as the measure of quality.”
—Josef Muller-Brockman, Zurich